


houses and museums

by sabraneadaz



Category: Goldilocks - Laura Lam
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Interlude, Introspection, Post-Canon, cavendish - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 14:41:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29809953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sabraneadaz/pseuds/sabraneadaz
Summary: As she packs up her belongings for Godwin Station, Grace Lovelace Kan considers the women who shaped her future.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	houses and museums

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HalfBakedPoet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HalfBakedPoet/gifts).



> For my wonderful girlfriend, [HalfBakedPoet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HalfBakedPoet/pseuds/HalfBakedPoet), on her birthday <3  
> To many more years of sharing literature, my love.

Houses, Grace thought, were museums. The paraphernalia of a preserved life patiently waiting for a pair of archival gloves to piece their story together. Grace had never liked museums. Cavendish was chock full of them, plot upon plot of clunky buildings in the old-Earth style, filled with sterile and motionless climate-controlled cases of pottery shards and jewels and bog bodies. Before they came to Cavendish Grace had never been in a museum. They had all been closed years prior when air pollution proved too great a risk to the exhibits, and decontamination chambers wasted resources. On Cavendish, their school trips to museums had always left Grace spitting fury like broken teeth. Fury at those who had punctured their planet until it choked. Fury at those who valued bits of pots and pans more than people. Fury at the people on Cavendish who refused to let go of the Earth, refused to change their ways, seemed determined to shove Cavendish towards that same end.

Grace hated museums. She hated the past. She hated history. She hated houses.

She looked at the piles of _stuff_ tripping out of her wardrobe and onto the bedroom floor. A museum of her own: a pile of old Pads she’d never thrown away; an old Earth laptop that had belonged to her dad; folders of paper-printed academic certifications from Before; and several drives full of research papers and vids of her graduation ceremonies on Cavendish.

Knick-knacks from her friends and family scattered the floor – space-themed, of course. One that made her pause was a toy based on those Old-Russian dolls where you’d open them and find another, smaller doll. This one was made of glass and copper – sustainably sourced – and painted in bright colours. Grace flicked the diamond white ship’s outer catch and the shuttle’s point sprang up on its hinge. An intricate engine woven with copper pushed out of the shuttle’s nose, its cogs turning lazily in the metalwork. At the touch of a rectified button at its side, the cogs twisted and opened the engine’s chamber like a ribcage. A spacesuit drifted out at the end of the twisted metal of a tether.

The spacesuit was outdated; white and bulky and nothing like the streamlined suits Grace donned in zero-G training. This was the kind of suit built during the slow demise of the Earth. The kind of suit her mother wore on the Atalanta. Just as gradually as it had emerged, the tether began to spin ona wheel inside the chamber, the shuttle splitting apart to allow its loop around the exterior. When it returned to the chamber’s entrance, the suit stopped. Its visor flicked back. A tan face framed with black hair and dark eyes stared back at its human counterpart.

The shuttle was a gift from her tetya, Oksana. It was a gorgeous piece of machinery, but no doubt her aunt hadn’t made the entire thing with her own hand – the artistry was too fine for a shuttle engineer. Her tetya had been the engineer aboard the Atalanta with Grace’s mother, and she was the first person to welcome them onto Cavendish when Grace was still a child. 

Looking away from the shuttle, Grace plucked a tiny plastic wrench from its shiny plastic casing. You couldn’t find anything like this on Cavendish now. Children’s toys were made of natural materials, carefully extracted and produced according to strictly enforced sustainability laws, and in the later years of the exodus non-biodegradable plastics were banned on all space transport for fears of Earth’s detritus poisoning their new haven. But there were no such laws when they moved, and some of their plastic possessions had fallen through the cracks. 

Grace recalled the show and tell sessions back in Earthen elementary school. She remembered the weight of her filter mask around her small neck, the plastic wrenches and screwdrivers held proudly aloft in her little fists as declared that she would be an engineer when she grew up, just like her Auntie Oksana.

Grace clicked the wrench back into place into its red toolbox. Next to it lay a stethoscope; real, not a toy. Auntie Irene has gifted to her after a playdate at her and Autie Jerrie’s house. Grace didn’t know if ‘playdate’ was the right word since the only other kid there was Iris, but Grace had always enjoyed the company of her aunties more than other kids. One day her childlike curiosity had gotten the better of her and she’d discovered Irene’s medical kit. In hindsight, she thought, Irene had every reason to be annoyed at her for messing with her equipment, but instead she slid the ear pieces gently into place through Grace’s long hair and placed the diaphragm over her own heart. Grace had been awed by that vital _th-thump, th-thump_ , and for the rest of the day she’d thumped around the house, demanding to listen to Iris’s heart, auntie Jerrie’s heart, her father’s heart, and complaining loudly whenever any of them laughed or talked and ruined that pure _th-thump_. When they left that afternoon the bell of the stethoscope was tucked in her little palm, but Auntie Irene never asked for it back. That week, Grace was convinced she’d be a doctor when she grew up.

With a sigh, Grace pulled a box marked ‘STAY’ in thick pen closer with her foot, and stashed the tools and stethoscope carefully inside. By the end of the day the museum of her young life would exhibit only stack of cardboard boxes.

Grace clicked the catch on her shuttle and watched as the mechanisms slowly folded themselves back inside its chamber. She rolled the shuttle into a tube of thick fabric. That was another departure from Earth – when they had made the journey to Cavendish bubble wrap was completely out of the question. The Lovelace-Kans had wrapped their possessions in their clothing for the journey, which, in fairness, saved a lot of space. Now on Cavendish everyone used specially woven fabrics which were tightly wound in shock-absorbent layers. Grace carefully twisted the ends of the tube inwards and creased them into shape. With a firm hand, she deposited it into the box marked ‘TAKE’. She would think about this shuttle when she took her first step out of her own life-sized one, orbiting the speckled eye of Cavendish.

Next up was a beautifully lacquered box, inlaid with velvet. Custom indents in the casing cradled each component of Grace’s very first telescope. The ‘scope no longer had much value, except to those are collectors with a penchant for vintage tech. Auntie Jerrie had taken it with her and Irene when they moved to Cavendish, promising Grace that they would see stars in the sky one day. Jerrie had kept that promise. The very same evening Grace had stepped off the landing pad on Cavendish Jerrie bundled her off to the hills, desperate to show her the sparkling stars in the crystal clear night sky.

A thin black folder lay atop the body of the telescope. Opening it, Grace discovered the star maps she’d charted in those first years with Auntie Jerrie. She had listened intently as her Aunt taught her to chart the constellations and calculate flight-paths based on their distance and position in the sky. The first time Grace had coded a flight-simulation looping around Aegir and back to Cavendish, Jerrie had high-fived her with a proud ‘We’ll make a navigator of you yet, Kan’.

Unlike the plastic toolbox, the lacquered box closed with a gentle ‘thud’, softened by the velvet. Grace placed the ‘scope in the ‘STAY’ box next to the stethoscope and toolbox.

The largest item on her wardrobe floor glinted in the red light filtering through her bedroom window. Grace brushed off the clothes covering the frame of the terrarium. It was a gorgeous object; windows of elongated pentagonal glass stretching upwards into a teardrop. Instead of metal framework, the joins themselves were fused glass, creating an entirely transparent, seamless finish. Now, it was dull. Dust and clothing fibres brushed its exterior, and there were no plants ensconced in its cradle. Even if there had been, Grace thought, they would have been long dead by now.

Once, a lush green plant had filled the inside, buried in rounded mineral stones, the red Cavendish dirt, and sprouting red plants akin to succulents. As most children did, Grace had once idolised her mother. Naomi had gifted her the terrarium, patiently teaching her how to plant the seedlings and monitor the light and heat source. They filmed the terrarium’s water cycle; that endless looping of evaporation and condensation to sustain the life inside. Grace spent hours looking at her terrarium. She recorded her plant’s height and colour on a little chart by its side, and her notebooks were filled with anatomical diagrams of its leaves. 

Grace rested the base of the terrarium on her knees and pressed her face up close against it, leaving a smudge mark from her nose on the glass. She sighed. Her mother had forever been chastising her for dirtying terrariums with her sticky fingers.

The terrarium was a beautiful thing, and for that short period Grace was convinced she would become a botanist. But after years of shadowing her mother in her workshop and on Earthen reforestation sites, Naomi knew it she couldn’t do it. It was too easy. Too close to home.

Grace pushed the terrarium aside. She glanced furtively towards the door, and seeing that it was closed, she dug around at the back of her wardrobe. Her fingers danced over pairs of old trainers and dust masks until they found an unmistakeable fabric pouch. She drew the zip open and tipped its contents into her palm. 

The object was plain and bulky. The colour was a kind of milky white that seemed delicate despite the robust material. Grace rolled the nose of the thing between her fingers, then stood the miniature Ark ship upright on her palm. It wasn’t beautiful like the terrarium or the shuttle, and it wasn’t academic like the stethoscope or telescope. It was rather ugly and useless, all things considered. The Art was a product of old school Earthen 3-D printers, and like the telescope it hailed from long before the Atalanta 5. 

When Grace found out she’d passed through to the Godwin Space Programme, she’d furtively booked in a vid call with her grandmother. Imprisonment didn’t agree with Valerie. She looked older than her years, but life sparked back in her eyes at the news of Grace’s imminent ascent to Godwin’s Astronaut Programme. Valerie had leaned over the table, as if to reach through the vid feed and take Grace’s hands in her own.

“Just remember, Grace,” she’d said. “Remember why we do what we do.”

A month later, the Ark ship had turned up on the doorstep, clad in packaging that would have been non-descript if not for the multitude of prison check stamps which dominated the wrapping.

Grace fingered the nose of the Ark once more.

She placed it – gently – in the box.

**Author's Note:**

> This little ficlet is a birthday gift for my beloved girlfriend. Fic is what brought us together, as I discovered what a fantastic writer she was and proceeded to spam her notifications with absurdly long comments. I hope you enjoy this story, love, and I hope anyone else who may read it will enjoy it too.


End file.
